Modern medicine benefits greatly from the vast number of technical advancements that are at the disposal of practitioners. Among the key technical advancements that facilitate improved medical care, medical imaging devices have been extremely important to enabling practitioners to identify issues, address those issues and verify proper healing. Computed tomography (CT) scans, x-rays, magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), ultrasound images, and the like have all been employed to great effect in improving medical care.
Although medical imaging techniques continue to improve, it should be appreciated that the timing and cost associated with employing medical imaging may not always enable such tools to be employed liberally at every possible point at which they might be useful. For example, when positioning a bone fragment during surgery, although it might be desirable to track the movement of the bone fragment in three dimensional space during the surgical procedure, it is generally not practical to employ costly and time consuming three dimensional imaging techniques at that time.
As such, imaging techniques remain tools that have to be employed when appropriate to obtain the greatest impact. However, if employed strategically and in the context of a comprehensive plan, the imaging techniques can be leveraged to be employed at the most opportune times to provide the best possible results.